To those looking for an understanding of what life in a particular location is like, the utility of Google Street View is undeniable. Anyone can simply only open a web browser, navigate to Google, and enter a street address to be immediately dropped into a visual still-life of the landscape in Street View. This landscape is an interactive environment where one can modify the camera's orientation into new perspectives and change location on the fly. This interactivity provides immersion into the web environment.
The basic principle of Street View is described in U.S. Patent Application No. 2008/0266324 to Lynch et al., titled “Street level video simulation display system and method.” Video data is collected by traveling along roads in a geographic area and storing the video data along with data indicating the positions at which the video data had been captured. This captured video data is then used in navigation systems and other devices that provide navigation, routing, or other features. A video is presented to a user on the display of a navigation system or other device. An application associated with the navigation system uses the previously captured video data to create the video shown to the user. The application selects that video data that shows the end user's position from a vantage point. The application further superimposes an indication on the video at a location that corresponds to the position of the end user.
Street View was launched by Google in May 2007 to allow users to explore the world through images. Google Street View provides users 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street level views within Google Maps. In 2010, the platforms employed by Google typically include nine directional cameras for the 360° views, a GPS unit for positioning, and laser range scanners. Google collects these images using special cameras and equipment that capture and match images to a specific location using GPS devices. The vehicles employed vans, cars, and even bicycles to provide access to roads with various types of roads. These vehicles are equipped with multiple cameras mounted at a height about 2.5 m from the ground level and configured to generate a panoramic view from each point in the travel route of the vehicle. Once the images are captured, they are “sewn” together to create a 360° panorama. Faces and license plates are blurred before the panoramic images are served and become viewable in Google Maps. As of 2010, Street View is available for almost a dozen countries around the world in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. By providing an interactive panoramic view, Street View leaves the user with a degree of perception of the area so that the user no longer needs to visit the location in order to feel that the user understands the environment of the location.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0179895 to Zhu et al., titled “Three-Dimensional Annotations for Street View Data” discloses generating annotations corresponding to three-dimensional objects while viewing two-dimensional images. The generation of annotations can be achieved by projecting a selecting object onto a three-dimensional model created from a plurality of two-dimensional images. The selecting object is input by a user while viewing a first image corresponding to a portion of the three-dimensional model. A location corresponding to the projection on the three-dimensional model is determined and content entered by the user while viewing the first image is associated with the location. The content is stored together with the location information to form an annotation. The annotation can be retrieved and displayed together with other images corresponding to the location.
Currently, Google provides the “3D Buildings layer” in Google Earth. The 3D Buildings layer provides a bird's eye perspective of buildings for Google Earth. One of the biggest detailed examples is New York City. The 3D Buildings layer folder has two sub-layers: Photorealistic Building layer that include models with photos applied to add complex details and colors, and Gray Buildings layer which are 3D geometric models without photo textures or colors. The Gray Buildings layer usually came from GIS databases provided to Google by cities or 3D city database companies. Eventually Google acquires photo data for these gray cities and adds the photorealistic details to the models to generate Photorealistic Building layer.
The 3D models in the layer actually are built by many different people and organizations and uploaded to the Google 3D Warehouse. For this reason, many 3D building models are found all over the world in Google Earth. Most of the 3D building models have been built by people using SketchUp and uploaded to the 3D Warehouse. To be picked up by Google and included in the 3D layer, the 3D building models have to adhere to basic guidelines set out by Google.
In general, one faces a complex task when searching for a new residence in a large urban environment, e.g., in a big city such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, and Seoul. A number of online databases have emerged to help buyers in this quest. Examples are StreetEasy.com and more recently also Google Maps Real Estate. These sites allow users to search and compare apartments for sale by price, size, location, and building history. Typically, pictures of the apartment's interior and sometimes of the building exterior are also available.
While such sites have become indispensible in the search for city apartments, these sites still leave much to be desired because additional information such as the amount of sun exposure at living quarters, in addition to the basic information currently available, can be crucial in determining the desirability of prospective residences. Knowing only whether a particular apartment faces north, south, east, or west is generally not sufficient since other urban structures may block the incoming light either constantly or over significant periods of time. Some real estate listings typically provide links to external location-mapped environments such as Google Street View to allow users to gain some understanding of these more complex variables. However, Google Street View as currently available is necessarily only a snapshot of time, and does not reveal the complex temporal patterns of daily and seasonable exterior lighting.
Access to sunlight, i.e., “solar access,” in living spaces is of great importance for quality of life. For example, it has been shown that solar access and exposure are among the key factors in creating attractive settings for pedestrian gathering in streets and plazas. The verticality of urban landscapes tends to amplify the dynamic character of daylight through the casting and progression of shadows by tall buildings. Planners and architects have long appreciated, at least qualitatively, that the energy dynamics of buildings and the perception of the urban environment are related directly to the prevailing daylight conditions.